Color Wheel: Chris Burden at the New Museum

Chris Burden, "A Tale of Two Cities," 1981 (Image courtesy of the New Museum)

Color Wheel is a series in which we identify this week’s trending color in art, and post a daily image that illustrates its popularity. This week’s color is brown.

Brown is the color of cookies, and sadness, and a hole in the desert soil where an airborne bomb has detonated.

Hence, Chris Burden’s “Extreme Measures” is really brown. Brown is also the color of concrete sandbags, stacked to create a makeshift bunker. It’s the color of rust on a one-ton cube, suspended from a 1964 F350 Ford crane truck. It’s the color of the mad blurry streak created when a three-ton, cast iron flywheel, is set in motion by the rear wheel of a motorcycle. After a week of writing brown color wheels, we can assure you this: Chris Burden is the ultimate master of brown.